Existing feature attribution methods like SHAP often suffer from global
dependence, failing to capture true local model behavior. This paper introduces
VARSHAP, a novel model-agnostic local feature attribution method which uses the
reduction of prediction variance as the key importance metric of features.
Building upon Shapley value framework, VARSHAP satisfies the key Shapley
axioms, but, unlike SHAP, is resilient to global data distribution shifts.
Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that VARSHAP
outperforms popular methods such as KernelSHAP or LIME, both quantitatively and
qualitatively.